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January held the kind of intensity of a dump truck running over my body over and over- but not in a totally bad way. Mostly it was the month full of challenges at work, trying to figure out if wearing heels was worth the professionalism boost vs the fact that i’m still not adept enough to run around rapidly in them and the subsequent decrease in speed that would bring. It was also the month where I didn’t get much done, artistically speaking, due to coming home from work dragging the stress with me till I finally fell asleep much too late into the hours past midnight.

Not an over-all bad month though.

February though, i’ve got plans for you. I have 4 books I’m pretty much going to force myself to get through if I have to, just so I can get back on the reading horse, since it seems my ravenous love for books has taken a backseat to anything and everything else and I really want to blame tumblr for that and the way it sucks me in for hours on end reading what amount to essays on the upcoming Captain America movie and marveling at gifsets and edits for even the most overlooked characters/moments in films and books. It so easy to obsess over the things I love on there and gods if it’s not my most severe addiction.

But, books! Currently just a couple of pages away from finishing the Welcome to Night Valenovel and I still haven’t decided how I feel about it. On the one hand the writing is excellent and my head conjures up images of used car salesmen howling on the roof of broken down cars much easier than when I listen to the podcast but on the other hand…there is something lacking that I can’t quite put my finger on. The World Is Curved is something I picked up on my last ill-advised trip to Half-Price books (ill advised because I always come home with twice as many books as I said I would) with a couple of other economics themed books I’m honestly excited to tear through as it means I’ll be closer to being able to buy those econ books that don’t hold your hand while dumping all kinds of insane theories at you. Saga was gifted to me by the boyfriend for Christmas and if you haven’t heard of it I really suggest you go give it a look-see. The art is amazing, the characters startlingly unique and the story is the perfect blend of humorous and heartbreaking. The last book i’m getting through is The Cosmic Perspective but honestly, it’s not really a book you read through, mostly because it’s actually a textbook and something I picked up as a reference source for a project i’m working on, though for a textbook it’s terribly engrossing and makes me want to walk up to people and be like “DID YOU KNOW-” about space things.

Apart from dealing with pharmaceutical intricacies at work, plowing through a mini-stack of books,tempering my addiction to tumblr, and trying to finish art projects, i’ve also been writing. There are currently 6 legal pads filled with inane ideas, store outlines, world building, plot points and character arcs and while i’m still editing the last project (Whiskey Runner- the Ocean Is Spilling) so I can feel more confident about shopping it around to agents, it hasn’t stopped me from dreaming of treasure hunting space pirates colliding with honor-bound tech savvy marauders, Djinns on roadtrips across the great heartland of America, and messing around with the idea of Empaths and the idea of what love could mean to someone who very literally, feels everything. My best friend has put up her services to help me pick which will be the next project, so heaven help her with that honestly.

Not drowning in my coffee cups yet,
~m

P.SThe silver skull featured in the photos above is named Skully because I was very tired and feeling really unimaginative the day I got him and you’ll be pleased to know the the lady at the furniture store I purchased him from gave me the weirdest look when I told her I would be putting him in the loft where I keep my books. But you tell me where the f*** else am I going to put him, the garden?

So, it’s been a while since I posted anything on here.
And… I regret that,for a lot of reasons but mostly because… there’s been a lot going on, and without the motivation to post about it on here, I haven’t really felt like i’ve been as aware of my surroundings as I usually am. The way my hands itch for the feel of a shutter button pressing down when I catch a glimpse of something quick and beautiful or the way my thoughts rapidly compose words for how to best describe some non-sensical idea, it’s been severly lacking these past few weeks, without the motivation to put everything together into something that makes sense, like a post on here.

Of course, the blame also goes to being so utterly fucking exhausted from moving into the new house and unpacking everything, not to mention dealing with painting about 80% of it’s interior. Who thought buying a two story house was a good idea? This girl, thats who, because apparently I make the oddest life choices.

Anyways, for anyone who reads this still, and just for my own pleasure of mind, I’m well and alive, better than I was last month even, somehow. My sleeping schedule finally thunked itself into order, and 4am tumblr scrolling has become a distant memory, something I couldn’t be more grateful for, considering my insomnia is something i’ve been battling for almost a year now. I’m still picking up the pieces of all the friendships that I selfishly placed on the back burner since last November, but coming up the second half of this year, i’m not feeling my usual melancholy self and with a really odd southern-gothic music playing on repeat in my ears constantly, i’m getting….somewhere.

I don’t even know what i’m trying to say here honestly, but hey, at least I can say regularly scheduled posting is coming back and isn’t that something? And with that will come more talks about this insanely gorgeously house me and the bf bought, posts about the short roadtrip we took to Arkansas that somehow took us through a good chunk of Missouri as well and how insanely cool that whole thing was, no matter how much it freakin rained, and the usual posts about Texas and it’s hidden spots.

Also, prepare for some Vulcan-inspired mountains, my art got really weird there for a bit…

I write stories,here and there. Little ones and big ones that I never finish but invent in my head till there’s almost no breathing room. This one, I started it the fall of 2013, before I even made this blog, creating a very loose first draft kind of thing, fleshing out some characters and plot lines and writing a couple of pages here and there. After a couple of months though, I put it aside for other things (photography, travel,art journaling, work) and it wasn’t until a couple of months into 2014 that I came back to it, jolted alive into it by a roadtrip I took down North California’s coast. Inspiration and motivation come in weird ways, at odd times, and I remember standing in the morning sunlight on a beach in Fort Bragg, watching the waves break and it just, it became clear that it was something I should go back to, dig in to.

Cue the montage of ideas rushing through the brain and many (many) cups of coffee while I scribbled like a maniac on dozens of notecards and compiled new plot points, new storylines, a whole new territory built on the wreckage of the last. It was a mess, tortuous at times even, but man, overall? It was crazy fun to exercise my brain like, give my imagination full reign to run free and construct, tear down, bring back up, to spill forth like unending waves.

And gods, I wish I could say since then i’ve been writing constantly, words filling up blank word doc.s like they were an easy gift, that i’m writing this post ’cause i’ve finally finished it and hooray for all.Truth is though, I put the story together, gathered up all my original characters and bundled them neatly into bunches, wrote out a complete chapter by chapter breakdown of the story, and then… I quit again. Or I should say, I didn’t quit so much as I just abandoned the project to run around in other areas of interest. Again. Sprechen sie deutsch?Tal vez mejor la musica en español? Anyways…

So, why am I writing this post? Hard to say really, except i’m finally halfway through the book, for reals this time, and while it’s been hard to put aside my other interests and hobbies in the name of banging this thing out, it’s also been pretty…neat, I guess you could say, to focus all my thoughts in one direction, like a laser beam made up of too much coffee and not enough showers. I’ve been isolated a good bit from friends and family for the last month, half out of not wanting to sit down and explain what exactly it is that i’m doing, what i’m writing, and the other half just because i’ve been too caught up in the bloodflood of words to do more than half wave at people from a distance while researching things like aconite and The Red Queen hypothesis. I doubt i’m sociable company right now anyways, a jittery M is not a very fun M.

So while I might have taken a break from my art journal posts ( at least on here, i’ve been reposting a couple of sets on tumblr that have turned out surprisingly popular) i’m wouldn’t be myself unless I was filling up pages in some way or another.

I’ve had this particular journal for over 2 years now, and let me just say, apparently it has been a messy couple of years. I spent the afternoon going through the pages and I can honestly say at times I just sat there, reading lyrics or lines of poetry, thinking, “wow, thats some seriously crazy overdramatic overtures of emotion right there.” Thing is, I either get clinically cold or failingly messy when i’m emotional and…. while I might not express much emotion in public or even in private, it almost certainly gets dripped and splashed all over these pages with hearty abandon.

Reaching the end of available space in this journal makes my heart clench a little, the idea of letting go of so much emotion and starting over again in a crisp, new notebook that doesn’t know the ups or downs of my emotions intimately, it even makes me panic a little. Truth is though, when push comes to shove, at the end of the day I fall towards logic more than most any emotion, so I know i’ll bend soon and go buy a new journal, start a new story.

For the meantime though, I still have at least a dozen pages to fill, and I think it’ll be nice to fill up some thoughts in there that will maybe not toss and turn all over the lines with so much emotional upheaval. Either way though, whether i’m gutting the pages with words or neatly printing lines of concise characters, it’s seen me through some tough and trying times, interesting waves and crashing journeys and I can only really try my best to look forward to what i’ll be filling up the next one with.

Life currently has been going steady. Which is good, usually life for me feels like one whirlwind adventure (or terrible, terrible mistake spiraling into absurdity ) after another. But currently life is steady as it goes and i’m trying to enjoy it, while reading books, eating awesome In & Out burgers, cozying up in sweaters and testing out my new camera lens in the quiet of my home.

Things are gonna get nuts again soon of course, since i’ve got my license/certification renewal coming up, perhaps a small job search after that, I need to figure out what the fudge car i’m going to buy before my current car dies on me and leaves me stranded on some unlit backroad, there’s a crap-load of mail and emails from friends I need to catch up on and figure out how to repair damaged friendships from last year, the bf has started a new job and soon we’ll need to start looking for a new apartment after which we want to start figuring out where we’ll be traveling to (maybe Scotland and Ireland are looking great)… and those are just the things that I know about right now. So you know, probably i’ll just go ahead and relax a little right now.